'No. It didn't seem pertinent. It still doesn't, really. That is, I suppose it could wind up being a police matter, but-'
'It didn't seem pertinent to the break-in?'
'To the break-in?' I looked at him stupidly. 'No. How could it-'
'Or van Cortlandt's death?'
'To Peter's death? What could it have to do with his death? Harry, if you're driving at something, you've left me way behind.'
'Well, I don't know, but doesn't it seem to you like there are an awful lot of weird things going on?'
'There sure are, but that doesn't mean they're connected, does it?'
'In my line of work, yeah, it usually does. I gotta go.' He worked his thin shoulders into the coat and suddenly laughed. 'Hey, don't look so worried.' He clapped me tightly on the arm and turned to the door. 'I'm just thinking like a cop; I can't help it. Forget it.'
Chapter 7
I forgot it.
As much as I'd love to say that I didn't, that I mulled over his words, turned them over in my mind, realized at last how dense I'd been not to put things together myself, that isn't what happened. I forgot it. Almost the minute he was gone.
Flittner had finished up the lighting and came over to me as Harry left.
'The exhibition looks great, Earl,' I said honestly. 'The lighting's magnificent.'
He grunted. 'Something I can do for you?' The implication was that this was his domain, not mine.
'No thanks.'
'Just want to look at the pretty pictures?'
'Yes.' I'm not sure why it didn't seem like a good idea to tell him about the forgery. Mainly, I think, I just didn't want to explain again. But perhaps something in me felt it was better if he didn't know. Or maybe I just didn't want to talk to him any longer than I had to.
He grunted again, shrugged, and headed morosely for the door, already reaching for one of the Camels that he deprived himself of while working around the paintings.
Alone, I got on with my reason for coming to the Clipper Room in the first place, not that I had much of an idea of what I was looking for. Peter had told me that the forgery was down my alley, which might mean something as specific as the Vermeer, or possibly anything from the Renaissance through the Baroque; let's say from the fifteenth century to 1750-Piero through Luca Giordano. Seven pictures, all told. Not so bad, really.
But it was also possible that 'down your alley' might have meant something else entirely-Peter had been in a whimsical frame of mind-so to be on the safe side I went through the entire collection.
I began by looking for the technical inconsistencies of place and time that I'd mentioned to Harry. You might think that an odd place to start; if, after all, I am the expert on Baroque and Renaissance art that I keep (ever so subtly) hinting I am, why would I not immediately get down to examining each painting from a stylistic perspective? Did the Venus and the Lute Player show Titian's characteristic use of fingers more than brush in the final stages? Did the Hals demonstrate his singular ability to fool the viewer into thinking he is looking at a dazzling bravura display of reckless spontaneity when in fact each stroke had been laid on with the slowest, most meticulous care? Was the Vermeer illuminated with pointilles, those tiny, mysterious dabs of paint that seem to drench the canvas with light?
Intuitively, those are the kinds of judgments I trust the most, but they are matters of degree, subjective and therefore arguable-and, in any case, tricky to make. Easier to begin with a simpler yes/no question: Did any of the materials show outward signs of having come from some time or some place other than they should have?
They didn't. That didn't mean they weren't faked, only that there weren't any obvious signs. Later, I'd want to take them off the walls and turn them around, to see what the backs had to say for themselves. (At the moment I didn't care to challenge our formidable new intrusion-detection system.) In the meantime there was more I could do right now. I could haul out my ten-power battery-lit lens and have a good, hard look at the craquelure.
Craquelure means 'crackling'-the network of fine, black lines that covers the surface of any old oil painting as a result of shrinkages in the paint film and varnish. There is almost no such thing as an old painting without craquelure, so forgers must create it, and they have come up with a lot of clever ways to do it, from wrapping the painted canvas around a roller (which has been done by fakers since the 1600s) to putting it in a 120-degree oven for a couple of days, to using a special 'restorer's varnish' that contracts while it dries and is guaranteed thus to crackle the surface of any painting to which it's applied.
But fooling a knowledgeable eye is difficult. There are all sorts of esoterica for a crook to worry about: Paint on canvas shrinks differently from paint on panels (the former cracks in a spiderweb pattern, the latter along the grain of the wood); the extent of craquelure varies less with age than with media (the deepest cracks are found in early-nineteenth-century pictures that were painted with crack-prone materials); and there is a big difference between a painting that cracks from the surface down and one that cracks from the ground up (both occur naturally, but under different circumstances).
All very handy to know, but of course, high-class forgers know it at least as well as anyone else and have devised ways of meeting the challenge. At this point, however, I was still hoping-with diminishing confidence-that I was dealing with something less than a first-class forgery, and so might find something quickly. I looked at them all, not just the seven likely ones, and found nothing. Round one to the forger.
That had taken two hours, I went out, had a couple of cups of coffee, and returned to begin again with the Piero della Francesca and work my way through to the 1881 Manet, this time concentrating on the signatures. By now I was relatively sure that I wasn't dealing with a modern fake but an old one. And as I'd told Harry, most of the old forgeries still around had begun as honest works of art by honest artists, which were later transformed into other things. Sometimes the original painting was left pretty much as it was; sometimes it was altered in one way or another to make the fraud more credible. One change, however, was mandatory: A counterfeit signature had to be added. Not all genuine paintings are signed, but all forgeries are, for obvious reasons.
What I was searching for was some sign of signature-tampering. Sometimes a forger will paint out an existing signature and then simply paint a new one over it. This is easy to detect, and more clever crooks will erase the signature down to the ground, then reprime the damaged spot, build up the paint layer by layer, and install a new signature with a new coat of varnish (appropriately crackled) over it. There are other techniques too, and to my pleasure I spotted one, but it didn't bring me any closer to what I was looking for.
It was on the Vermeer, of course; the one with the fake de Hooch signature. The false signature itself was beautifully done. I have to admit that I probably wouldn't have recognized the few signs of overpainting if I hadn't known that they had to be there. What did catch my eye, however, was an inconspicuous low cabinet in the background, seen through the triangle formed by the clavichord, the woman's extended left arm, and her side.
On the face of the cabinet was an odd crownlike design, vaguely oriental, which closer examination very satisfyingly revealed to be the original Vermeer monogram-IVM- deftly transformed with only four curving strokes into a meaningless geometrical decoration. Naturally, this resoundingly confirmed Young Woman at the Clavichord as an authentic Vermeer.
Or did it? There was always the possibility that some particularly cunning forger had done this so that I, or somebody like me, would come proudly to the conclusion I'd just reached. It wouldn't have been the first time.
It was starting to look as if I might need some scientific help before I was done. Fortunately, I was sure it would be available from Berlin's Technische Universitat, where Max Kohler ran one of the world's major art laboratories. Kohler and I had worked together before, and he could do what I couldn't-chemically analyze the material in the craquelure, for example. All forgers must fill in their artificial cracks with black or gray matter-ink, paint, soot-or they won't look real. But three centuries of accumulated dust and grime are impossible to duplicate chemically. Fooling my eye was one thing; fooling Max's mass spectrometer was another.
Why, then, didn't I ship the whole batch over to Kohler's lab right off instead of messing with my Neanderthal techniques? First, because you just don't send thirty-five million dollars' worth of art treasures across the city to your nearest lab; it doesn't work that way. It creates insurance problems and logistics problems, it's risky for the
